FPGA implementation of multi-dimensional Kalman filter for object tracking and motion detection

Abstract

Object tracking and motion detection are the major challenges in the real-time image and video processing applications. There are several tracking and prediction algorithms available to estimate and predict the state of a system. Kalman filter is the most widely used prediction algorithm as it is very simple, efficient and easy to implement for linear measurements. However, these types of filter algorithms are customized on hardware platforms such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to achieve design requirements for embedded applications. In this work, a multi-dimensional Kalman filter (MDKF) algorithm is proposed for object tracking and motion detection. The numerical analysis of proposed tracking algorithm achieves competitive tracking performance in contrast with state-of-the-art tracking algorithms trained on standard benchmarks. Furthermore, MDKF is implemented on Xilinx Zynq™-7000 System-on-a chip (SoC). The implementation of MDKF on SoC performs 2× times tracking speed than that of software approach. The experimental results provide resource utilization of about 61.43% of Block RAMs (BRAMs), 90.09% of DSPs, 83.27% of Look-up tables (LUTs) and 82.35% of logic cells operating at 140 MHz with power consumption of 780 mW which outperforms previous related methods.